Egypt witnessed radical and unexpected changes in political, social and cultural environment that came as a result of the Arab Spring. Since the revolution caused a paradigm shift in so many socio-economic aspects; it is plausible that it also caused dramatic changes in different ways in the...

There is considerable interest in increasing the representation of women on the boards of publicly traded corporations. Currently, only 17 percent of independent directors in the United States are women. In this Closer Look, we examine the pathways that women took to become the first female...

We use the special case of Finland to analyze the role of nomination committees on board diversity and composition. We compare board diversity in two types of firms: firms with a nomination committee composed of board members, and firms where the (usually three) largest shareholders choose a...

We ask when and how a diverse board can benefit shareholders. Board diversity may be value-increasing even if some directors have agendas that are not perfectly aligned with shareholders' interests. Diversity commits the board to a high information standard because directors with opposing...

We examine the link between age diversity on boards of directors and corporate misconduct. We find firms with age-diverse boards to be associated with significantly less corporate misconduct – both in terms of the number of violations and the fines paid. This finding is robust to various...

We examine whether board demographic diversity enhances cognitive diversity (measured as director dissent in the boardroom) and monitoring. At the director level, we find that individual directors who are dissimilar relative to other board members in terms of tenure and experience are more...